Where the aliens are flying their UFOs

I came across some UFO sightings data on Infochimps, from the National UFO Reporting Center, and it seemed like a good excuse to mess around in R. I was just playing around, but the globular result was kind of fun to look at, so here it is.

The dataset is 60,000 sightings, but the above shows about 45,000 locations that could be geocoded immediately. The whiter the region, the more sightings there were in the area from 1906 to 2007.

Is it just me, or does the map above match up with this other map of major US airports?

Could some of the sightings actually be… airplanes? Nah. The aliens are coming. Luckily I have a big bat, several glasses of water, and asthma to keep me safe.

I found this veerrryyy interesting. I agree with the earlier posts about airports and population. It must have been fun for you to actually think about this and then do something with it. Please keep us all alerted with the latest information their coming. I’ve never met an alien I didn’t like…lol

It would also be interesting to see this with a 3rd variable of time. Is the distribution similar between historical activities:
1900-1930 (before large scale commercial flight)
1940-1945 (war)
1955-1965 (Cold War)
1990-today (when travel for the ‘ordinary’ business person became common)?
2005-today (pretty much everyone in the country has access to the internet’s easy-to-create information)

And comparing it to immigration (the terrestrial kind) might also be interesting. Do report frequencies increase when or where we get rapid increases of immigrants?

So we could potentially tease out the different effect of population centers from aircraft activity by looking to see if there are more reports in unpopulated areas in major air traffic routes than in unpopulated that are not in major air traffic routes. Looking at the map there appears to be some straight lines between major airports, which could be air traffic routes, but couple also be artifacts of interpolation. Which leads me to ask, what method of interpolation did you use?

But Mikev, every person posting (and the author) believes in UFO’s. They exist, we all know they the exist, they are seen everyday. So with that comment made have no fears, you can continue believing in UFOs.

That said, just don’t believe that a UFO has any ties into interstellar travel and like that you can be very contented in your beliefs :) …..

What if you made a map of UFO sightings by county divided by county population to see if certain locales are more UFO-dense?

Another interesting analysis along the lines of your airport theory would be to take a dataset of known aircraft flight paths and create a distance (20 mile?) buffer around each of those lines, then sum the total number of buffers above a specific county/gridcell and then divide the total number of UFO sightings for that particular county/cell by the total number of likely airplane flightpaths visible from the ground.

This would give you a by-density comparison of UFO sightings to likely airplane sightings and see if there is a correlation.